Yesterday, I did a lengthy piece on what options were available to our manager in terms of personnel, and of how some of our players – many of them in fact – were capable of playing in multiple positions for the team.
Today I want to look at the tactical systems which could utilise between now and the end of the campaign; I think we’ll see all of these in one form or another.
It isn’t always widely realised, but Neil Lennon is our most tactically flexible manager of the last two decades and perhaps longer. Almost every other coach at our club had one tactical system which he stuck to, often to the point where the fans got frustrated.
Many managers of the modern era are wedded to a single tactical approach, because it takes a long time to develop and system and have players get fully acquainted with it.
Furthermore, if you are the architect of that style there’s a temptation to persevere with it, especially when it’s been successful, way past the point where other clubs have figured it out.
It takes real courage to change a playing system on the fly.
It takes real self-belief to ask players to adapt to it, when they are used to something else.
This is why, I suspect, Lennon kept the Rodgers system as long as he did; partly because it worked, but partly too because the players were familiar and comfortable with it.
That system is the first one we’re going to look at; the 4-2-3-1, the most widely used formation at the top of football … and one that’s increasingly useless to us.
4-2-3-1: The System The Manager Inherited.
The system we predominantly play is not a kick in the head from this one; using inside forwards to supplement the forward line and with the support of an attacking midfielder. We have wing backs who get up the pitch and often find themselves where the wingers would normally be; they, of course, are either inside or just outside the box, as auxiliary strikers.
This formation can be tweaked in terms of the individual roles the players fulfil. Brown, for example, is a ball winning midfielder whereas his midfield partner – usually Callum – is a box-to-box player, or at least he was under Rodgers.
Now he plays a more withdrawn role as a deep lying playmaker, which he’s effective at but which blunts his effectiveness somewhat.
The problem we’ve had with the system is that the inside forwards end up outside the box and the lone striker is crowded out in a penalty area where there’s usually every man behind the ball. Our slow and steady style of play – which is designed to draw defenders towards you – actually now has the opposite effect as opposition managers know that’s what we’re doing and only have to insist that their team shows tactical discipline and keeps its shape.
The slow football also allows teams time to regroup, so whenever we have the ball you can watch them all charging back to form their defensive line as we pass the thing from side to side … and even when we get a break and we’re not facing a fully packed penalty area more often than not our wide men are exchanging passes with our fullbacks and trying to put it into the feet of the sole striker, who is usually being man marked by at least two defenders.
When you play a sole striker that’s what will happen.
It is to Eddie’s credit that he still manages to score a lot of goals, and of course the system is designed to get you a lot of goals from the wide men and the supporting midfielder, who last season was Ryan Christie and finished our second top goal scorer as a result.
When it works, it does work well … and at Celtic Park and on the wide pitch at Hampden, where it’s less easy to just put your back to the wall and defend the whole game, we can still pull part defences with it.
The problem, as we all know, has been away from home on little tight pitches against uber-defensive sides who try to hit us on the break.
The 4-2-3-1 tends to be used with a high press, and even when it isn’t it still tends to leave too many players high up the pitch making any team who uses it vulnerable to counter attacking play. We’ve seen that happen time and time again.
The system can be varied to combat this, but it means playing deeper and as the system was set up to create chances and goals from the wide men that would be counter-productive; how many teams actually do come and have a proper go at Celtic, home or away?
They’d need to for us to get any joy out of playing a counter-attacking game of our own.
The 4-2-3-1 has served us well, as far as it goes.
But too many teams have it figured out and too many of them just allow us to have possession knowing the final ball into the box is easily defended.
When our wide men run at people and pull the defenders out of position, that’s when we tend to get the best out of it … but disciplined teams remain hard to break down.
4-3-3: The System That Hasn’t Been Tried
Is this something Lennon might be willing to try?
It’s the first system we’re going to look at which dismisses the use of wingers altogether and goes with three up front, which is a battering ram which I reckon would destroy every defence in Scottish football but at the expense of Forrest and Elyounoussi, unless you played one or both of them as strikers, which, actually be a waste of the whole idea.
Even a packed defence would probably not be able to withstand a combination of Edouard-Klimala-Ajeti or a variant with Leigh Griffiths in it.
The three-man central midfield would also work against almost every club in the country, as we have by far the best players to make that system work.
The three midfield roles are obviously changeable … you could go with an attacking midfielder-ball winner-box to box midfielder or two defensive and one attacking, or if you were really going for it you could have play a deep-lying playmaker who’s job is simply to play it forward and two attacking midfielders to supplement the strikers.
Nuts, right? But it could work, against those teams who try to play for the draw against us every week.
Why has Lennon not trialled this?
Well, there are a couple of reasons and foremost amongst them is that Lennon does play with natural width in his team.
It is pretty unconventional for any team, these days, to play without wide men, and although this system could be tweaked to use attacking wing backs it is designed to be a narrow formation which focusses play through the middle … not a system or style favoured by two many modern managers, although that would be the beauty of it … unpredictability.
One thing; we do have the midfield assets to make that system work and with four strikers in the squad, and numerous players capable of playing an auxilliary role as one, including Forrest and now Christie, there’s little doubt we could play a variation of this.
4-4-2: Lennon’s Choice, Once.
It is not the sexiest formation in football, but once it was Celtic and Neil Lennon’s preferred style, and not even that long ago.
It was Ronny Deila who brought the 4-2-3-1 to Celtic Park; before that – and indeed during his time at Hibs – Lennon was a stickler for the balance and simplicity of the 4-4-2 system, one Martin O’Neill and Gordon Strachan had used a lot.
It has always been Tactics 101 stuff, the 4-4-2, and yet it’s also a highly complex and changeable system, which is why it survives to the present day.
If Lennon wants to play his wingers, his full backs and his two strikers then we’re playing 4-4-2 but that doesn’t mean that we have to play the simplistic version of it in the picture.
Some 4-4-2 push one of the midfielders into the “hole” behind the strikers.
Others drop one back.
The 4-4-2 “narrow” doesn’t use wingers at all and puts a defensive midfielder between the defence and the midfield and an attacking player behind the strikers, with two holding midfielders in the middle. You can use the 4-4-2 diamond, which has wingers, one defensive midfielder in the “anchor” role and another supporting the attack.
Don’t even get me started on the “asymmetrical 4-4-2” which is a variation on the diamond style but which has a zig-zagging look designed to create diagonal passing channels.
We definitely have the personnel for the 4-4-2 in any of its variations, but Lennon has tended, in this spell at Celtic, to put his faith in three men in the central midfield and for that reason alone it looks as if the 4-4-2 will get limited outings, and then usually with changes from the substitutes bench.
3-5-2: The One We’ve All Been Waiting For.
Although often called the 3-5-2 – which is what I’m going to call it for the benefit of this segment, what we’ll end up playing under Lennon is actually, as the diagram says, almost a 3-4-1-2.
A proper 3-5-2 would, in fact, have three central midfielders instead of two and a player “in the hole.”
Another variant is 3-1-4-2, which plays with one midfielder in the anchor role.
Push the wingers up in that one and you get the 3-1-2-4 … you see why I’m sticking to 3-5-2 as a catchall?
The 3-5-2 comes in as many variants as any of the tactics I’ve mentioned before, including one where the wingers play much further up the pitch than in the diagram – and there will be spells in the game where that’s exactly what we will be playing …
(The technical name for that, if you’re ready for this, is actually the 3-2-5; it is one of the most attacking systems anywhere in sport.)
The 3-5-2 is another versatile (as you can see) but balanced, formation except it has no fullbacks and asks the wingers to do an awful lot of work in a defensive capacity as well as playing their attacking game. Teams who do play with wingers tend to enjoy a lot of the ball out wide against the 3-5-2, but as few Scottish teams bother to play with more than one striker they’ll be crossing the ball into a penalty box where we have genuine power in the air and on the deck.
The beautiful thing about it is that whether or not you’re going with the version in the diagram or the more radically attacking version with the wingers in advanced roles, almost as inside forwards, is that you are giving the defence more than they can handle.
When we play with two main strikers you can see the confusion in the defence … and what’s already apparent is that Ajeti is brilliant at finding that little gap which he can exploit. Defences double marking Edouard are going to have nightmares with Ajeti prowling the box; it’s the reason (apart from that he’s a damned fine goal-scorer) that Leigh was having a rare old time last season when we switched formations and started playing him and Eddie together.
The 3-5-2 is where we’re heading with this team; that much is readily apparent.
The early transfer business is geared towards it, and in this version Forrest plays wide right and Elyounoussi plays wide left, with Christie supporting the strikers.
5-2-1-2: The Biggest Decision Lennon Will Have To Make.
When I saw the technical name for this tactic – almost certainly one we’re going to see Celtic use and more than a little, quite a lot as this season goes on – I thought “Nope, not even discussing it!”
But I had to because this is actually the point of the article because, technically, it could be construed as a 3-5-2 system which instead of using wingers uses the wing-backs instead.
This is not the ancient “Christmas Tree formation” (that would be the 5-2-2-1) although it does resemble it a little bit.
This, in fact, is not dissimilar to the Martin O’Neill 3-5-2, where he turned Didier Agathe into one of our best footballers and restored the fortunes (albiet briefly) of Bobby Petta. Which means it’s a system Lennon knows well and actually played in.
The reason I did this article was because of this tactic and the question as to whether Lennon would go with the wingers or the full-backs, because this is the tactic that uses the latter. And Taylor has proved himself adept at getting assists and so too has Frimpong. The question is whether or not there is room in this system for Abd Elhamed except as a central defender?
Now Lennon clearly does want another left back – we’re linked with one in the papers. This suggests to me that he’s doing more than just thinking about the 5-2-1-2 … he actually intends to play this system in certain games, from the start.
We are definitely going to see this formation, as we’re going to see the crazy 3-5-2 variant also known as the 3-2-5, but it’s the only one where Lennon doesn’t really have a lot of options because of what Bolingoli did earlier in the campaign, and this is not a formation where you’d select someone like Elyounoussi wide left and hope his defensive game is up to it.
The only other options on the left are either to play Frimpong on the left wing and Abd Elhamed on the right, or to – and I can’t believe I’m writing this – utilise our best left footed midfield player in that position, who happens to be Callum McGregor.
In some ways, and against some clubs, I actually think this will be Lennon’s preferred variation of the 3-5-2 system, and if Bolingoli hadn’t self-detonated his Celtic career it’s near certain that we’d be going to Ross County playing with him on one wing and Frimpong on the other.
As it is, we’re hunting for a new left back at the moment, and as soon as we get one it’s going to be a straight contest between this system and the 3-5-2 (3-4-1-2) we used last season to such great effect. And this, as much as anything, is the decision on which our season rests.
The CelticBlog faces many challenges going forward. If you like what we do, please subscribe and never miss another article. If you’re on Facebook, join us on our Facebook Group or share us on yours, if you’re on Twitter remember and re-tweet all our work.